Innocent Monster (19 page)

In the morning, the sheets were cold on her side of the bed. Mary Lambert was gone. And though I couldn’t possibly explain how I knew she would be, I knew she would be. The sex wasn’t any less satisfying. On the contrary, there was a depth and complexity to it that we hadn’t achieved during the previous night’s awkward unfamiliarity. Yet it was the sort of depth and complexity that only comes from pain. I knew something about that. It was a major feature of sex with Carmella. She made physical art of her pain and anguish and it was intoxicating. Even now, seven years removed from her touch, I found myself craving her, but what made her so addictive in bed also made her impossible to live with in the light of day. I didn’t know Mary Lambert well enough to make that judgment about her. Now I felt I never would. There was an air of permanence in her leaving. What there wasn’t was a note. I was at least thankful for that. It gave me hope, fragile and torturous as it was.

I showered and got dressed and decided that I needed to keep myself busy. Jews don’t generally buy into those rather puritanical adages about idle hands and the devil. I certainly didn’t, but today was an exception. I knew I had to keep moving or I wouldn’t be able to keep it all from crashing in on me. I needed to push away the feel of Mary Lambert’s kisses, the easy lock-and-key way I slid inside her, her scent. I needed to run away from John Tierney’s eyes. John Donne wrote that no man is an island. John Donne never met John Tierney. And the only way I knew to keep busy, to keep myself moving, was to work the case. I certainly wasn’t going to sit in my office and stare at old pictures of dead rock stars.

Jeff Fisher was more like it. He wasn’t schizophrenic. He wasn’t lost. He was just an asshole. And he insisted upon proving it with nearly every word that came out of his mouth. Fisher was an adjunct professor in figure drawing and art history at Pratt who had a website that made Nathan Martyr’s seem like a Sashi Bluntstone fan site. He was exactly the type of frustrated, resentful scumbag Sonia Barrows-Willingham had described. A man who had envisioned himself as the next great thing to come down the pike, but who wound up teaching the next generation of resentful bastards instead. The problem was, Fisher was nearly as big as Jimmy Palumbo and not nearly as friendly.

“Get the fuck away from me, dickhead,” he said, when I asked if I could step inside his basement apartment in Greenpoint.

“What’s the problem, your mommy and daddy don’t let you have visitors?”

“Fuck you.”

“That’s quite a vocabulary you got there, Professor Fisher. You pick that up at the Rhode Island School of Design?”

Knowing where he went to school got his attention, but not so that he was going to let me in to talk.

“Big deal. You could get that info off the school website. Now get the fuck outta here or I’ll have to make you.”

“You think so, huh?”

His answer was a stiff arm to my chest that knocked me back to the steps. My response was to show him my.38.

“You wanna try that again?” I asked.

He eyes looked scared, but the rest of him remained pretty calm. “No, I think I’ll just call the cops.”

“Do that. I used to be a cop and trust me, they’ll take my word over yours.”

“Gee, I’m just shaking in my shoes.”

“You’re not wearing shoes, Mr. Fisher.”

He actually looked down, then put his hand on the door. “Get outta here.”

“I wouldn’t do that. Shut the door, I mean. Because if you do, I think I might have to let your dean at Pratt and your neighbors know about your record.”

His hand stopped. His face went from angry to blank to scared, very scared. Now I had his attention.

“I think this is where you invite me in. Or maybe I should start screaming about what a bad boy you used to be at the top of my lungs. What do you think? She was what, thirteen years old?”

“I was thirteen too, goddammit!” he growled. “We were just exploring and kissing. It was a mutual thing. Don’t tell me you didn’t feel any girls up before you were eighteen.”

“We aren’t talking about me.”

“Besides, how the fuck did you—”

“In or out, Professor Fisher?”

He opened the door and retreated into the apartment. It wasn’t a bad place: a mix of modern and Scandinavian furniture, bare wood floors, a drawing table in the center of the living room, art supplies scattered all around it, walls covered in art that wasn’t all that different from Sashi’s.

“Those records are supposed to be sealed,” he said, lighting up a cigarette.

“Sealed, not expunged, Professor. Ain’t technology grand?”

“What do you want?”

“Where’s Sashi Bluntstone?”

He choked with laughter, little puffs of smoke giving form to his amusement. “You’re kidding me, right? Look around. Where do you think I’m keeping her, in my fucking pocket? This place consists of this room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. I got people upstairs who never leave. I don’t have a car. Go, take a look around while I finish my cigarette.”

I looked. Nothing.

“You happy now?”

“No,” I said, and introduced his testicles to my right foot. “Now I’m happy, asshole. Take that website down or I’ll create one of my own about you. Understand?” He shook his head yes. “Today!”

I waited around until he started breathing again, then I left.

The next two stops involved less violence, but got me to the same place. Nowhere. I hated to admit it, Sonia Barrows-Willingham was right. The antipathy for Sashi was founded on the study, hard work, and sacrifice her detractors had invested in careers that barely put food in their mouths or paid the rent.

My fourth stop of the day was my last stop. It was at a tenth-floor pigsty in a big faceless apartment house in Alphabet City on the lower East Side of Manhattan. The person who lived here used the screen name Leonardo when posting comments on Martyr’s blog, but the information Devo got me showed the name on the lease was Delia Parker. Whoever lived here, Delia, Leonardo, or Michelangelo, he or she didn’t have much love for Sashi Bluntstone. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot of love for her anywhere in this world.

I pushed the black, rectangular doorbell just below the peephole on the metal door to the apartment. No one stirred, but I sensed someone was home. Muted music drifted under the door riding piggyback on the stink of cigarette smoke and dirty diapers. I put my knuckles to the door and the rapping echoed along the hallway. Feet shuffled on the other side of the door and I felt an eye on me. I showed it my old badge.

“Open it, now!” I wasn’t in the mood for coaxing and cajoling.

Locks clicked. The door pulled back.

“Delia Parker?”

“Yeah, yeah, what is it, Officer?” she twitched more than asked between nervous puffs on her cigarette. “I got a sick baby to take care of here.”

Nearly six feet tall and weighing no more than ninety pounds, Delia Parker was a human scarecrow. Her blond hair was dull and lifeless, uncleaned and unbrushed. Her skin was red and blotchy and her gums had so receded that her smoke-yellowed teeth looked enormous in her hollow head. She was dressed in dirty, loose jeans and a t-shirt. She didn’t even try to hide the raw track marks running up and down both her arms. Delia Parker was a tweaker, a crystal meth addict and, by the look of her, she wasn’t going to be one for very much longer. She smelled like death and the next person who showed up at her door holding official credentials was apt to be from the medical examiner. At that moment, I couldn’t have known just how horribly right I was going to be. I put my badge away.

“May I come in? I’m not here to bust your chops about the crank.”

She almost seemed disappointed by that. I think she knew she was beyond helping herself and wanted desperately to be rescued. But we all want that, don’t we? What must it have been like, I wondered, to watch yourself drowning? Delia stepped back and shut the door when I stepped in.

“What then?”

“Sashi Bluntstone.”

She began laughing wildly, her whole body shaking. The laugh became a cough and the cough became vomit. The vomit was mostly yellowy-green mucus and blood. She fell to her knees. I found a towel, the least dirty one in the bathroom, and wiped her up. I put her down on her side to rest. Then I realized that that much noise would have woken up almost any baby. I left Delia where she laid and ran through the apartment looking for the baby. I found it in a filthy crib in the corner of the bedroom. The baby boy, blue and unbreathing, cold to the touch, was dead. His mother wasn’t the only soul in this place beyond help. I dialed 911, then sat down on the bed and waited, too numb to cry.

I didn’t listen to the press conference. I guess I couldn’t have even if I wanted to or had the strength to listen. I was too busy explaining myself to the long list of New York City officials who drifted in and out of the tenth-floor apartment. First there were the two uniforms, then the EMTs, then the detectives, then the ME’s man, then the housing rep, then it was the detectives again and again and again. That I was a retired cop and a lapsed-license PI helped, but not so much. The days of a badge getting you a pass were over. The necessity and art of ass covering had always been part of the job, but now with intense media scrutiny, cell phone cameras, and
Gotcha
! blogs, a smart cop didn’t give too many breaks to anyone just because he was once on the job. Maybe a little courtesy, but no breaks. That was probably a good thing, but it sure as shit didn’t feel like it to me.

Delia Parker’s story wasn’t much different than the rest of the Sashi haters. She was a promising artist who had come to New York after 9/11 to find out if she could make it on the main stage. She was an MICA graduate. I’d found her diploma on the floor next to her bed under some used condoms. It wasn’t tough to figure out what she’d been doing for drug money and, by the wasted look of her, she’d been doing a lot of it and not for very much a pop. Beneath the diploma I found photographs of the pre-meth Delia and her family. She was pretty once. She had been someone’s daughter and sister. She looked like her mom. Her sister looked more like her dad. I wondered about them. What did they think had become of their girl? Did they even know about the baby? They would know soon enough.

It’s a stretch to say that on the day you find a neglected, malnourished, and dead child in its filthy crib that things could get worse. A stretch, but not impossible. Because when I got back home to Sheepshead Bay, there was an envelope wedged between the jamb and my front door just above the knob. This was the note that had been missing this morning in the wake of Mary Lambert’s leaving.

I didn’t have it in me to tear up the note or act the jilted lover. I put the note on my kitchen table and took a long shower that must have used up all the hot water for the entire building. When I got out of the shower, I wrapped a towel around me, poured myself a scotch, and watched the news. McKenna wasn’t kidding around. They had gone big, all right. And Sonia Barrows-Willingham had given me a pleasant and unexpected
Go Fuck Yourself, Prager!
in the form of offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to Sashi Bluntstone’s safe return or to the whereabouts of her abductors. I raised my Dewars to the screen when the nasty piece of work finished making her announcement. Then I made three calls, two of them the hardest phone calls I’d ever had to make.

This time I got to New Carmens first and was seated in the same banquette that we had occupied the day before. The world had turned upside down in the brief eternity since then. Twenty-four hours ago I had Mary Lambert in my life and the feel of her still fresh in my memory. There was a baby boy still alive in an apartment in Alphabet City, his mother not yet a full-fledged monster. Sarah was about to breathe life into a moribund case and I still had hope.

Sarah snuck up on me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders. It was all I could do not to weep. My troubles were not lost on my daughter.

“Dad, Dad, what’s wrong?”

“A lot of things.”

“Sashi?” She sounded frightened. “Is it—”

“No, kiddo, it’s not Sashi.”

“Did you see the press conference?”

“I couldn’t, but I watched highlights on the news. Very impressive.”

The waiter came over and we ordered coffee and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. When he left, Sarah asked, “Do you think the reward money will help?”